Tag
go-to-market
10 posts
Your Liability Cap Does Not Cover the Sales Pitch
The liability cap in a managed services agreement limits what an MSP owes for bad work. It does not reliably limit what the MSP owes for a false statement made to win the deal. Eight court rulings across backup, software projects, cloud software, website builds, demos and security monitoring show the split, and seven checks tell an owner where the exposure sits.
The Reference Architecture
A reference architecture is a parts list with a rule attached: every client gets the same design. It is where top-quartile MSP profit comes from, and it is the one answer to why you and not the other three firms that quoted.
The Missing Service Catalog
A founder-led MSP prices every deal by feel, and the industry never settled on a model, so a hired seller has nothing to quote from. The service catalog gets written before the job description does.
The Vertical He Never Named
A founder-led MSP's client book usually clusters in one industry by accident. The buyer's job is to name it, because a vertical pitch is the one sales motion a hired seller can run without the founder.
Three Ways to Take the Sales Motion Away From the Founder
When a platform buys a founder-led MSP it buys a sales engine with one moving part. The industry runs three models for replacing him, from sixty days to never, and most platforms never chose one.
Your Growth Plan Has a Client-Size Problem
Demand for outside IT help rises with the size of the customer. The average MSP's client book runs the other way, and most of it sits in the band that buys least and takes almost as much work.
Half the Industry Sells Through the Owner
MSPs are almost evenly split between having a sales team and having sales run strictly by the founder. The standard deal removes that founder within two years. If you bought recurring revenue, half the time what you bought was a seller.
The Growth Engine You Bought Was the Founder
Organic growth stalls at sponsor-owned MSPs because the pipeline was the founder's personal referral network: unwritten, unbudgeted, and scheduled to leave with him. The fix gets built during the hold.
Your Vendors Reprice on a Calendar. You Don't.
Microsoft, Sophos, and Atera all raised prices this summer with dates and mechanics. Only 9 percent of MSPs have an increase written into their own contracts. The fix is escalators on paper and increases that arrive packaged, not bare.
Buying Was the Easy Part
There were 466 MSP acquisitions last year. What a platform owns the morning after is a book somebody else priced, sold by an owner who is leaving, on contracts that do not match its own. None of that becomes revenue by itself.